I’ve just moved most of our TBR shelf into the living room, where it can be seen and therefore perhaps take on greater urgency than being in the library (which seems like the sensible place for it, but we, y’know, *live* in the living room…). 90% of the books on it are more than 6 months old; 75% are more than a year old. Anything LEFT on it at the end of 2016 is going to the used bookstore unread, because enough is enough. I personally have about 40 books…
My major goal for 2015, as far as reading was concerned, was to try to clear out the TBR shelf. I started the year, AFAICT, with 79 books on it; it now has 46. I bought 17 new books, 15 of which I read, and I bounced off five books entirely. According to Goodreads I read a total of 59 books. According to my own recent reads page I read 66; the latter is more accurate although not necessarily spot on. I read most of them, by a considerable margin…
I dreamed I was trying to deal with our book collections, and found not one, but *two* copies of author Robin McKinley’s (obviously, from 1. the well-read condition of the books, and 2. their (differing) covers) 1980s-era fantasy novel ONCE UPON A TIME, and the fourth, interstitial (it fit between books 1 & 2), book of Pamela C Dean’s Secret Country trilogy. *grabby grabby grabby hands* I would pay good money to go back into that dream and read those two books cover to cover…
I’ve had Barbara Hamilton (Hambly)’s Abigail Adams books on my TBR shelf for quite a while, based on my love for her Benjamin January books. I didn’t like the Adams books as much as the January books, which kind of surprised me. It was partly, I recognize, the Puritanism in the books, which made me…impatient. I don’t have a lot of use for religious fundamentalists in real life, much less in my fiction, and the fact that Abigail Adams herself apparently struggled with her (literally) Puritanical faith did not help…
I confess that I would not have made it past page ten or so of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS had it not been written by a friend of mine. It’s not that it wasn’t well written: it was. It’s that it’s a zombie novel, and I’m not much of a horror fan. (Re: at all.) But I’ve known MR Carey for years now and he’s a wonderful human being, so I was inclined to try working my way past the subject material and going for broke. I’m glad…